Tech dreck

Disrupt this! Digital startups need old-line companies to survive.

At Internet Week New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio used the word "vibrant" a dozen times in his 28-minute shout-out to Silicon Alley last Monday. (Speechwriters: Download the WordBook XL app for iPad and iPhone.)

At a Citizens Budget Commission event, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen said our latest tech boom offers City Hall leverage to nix requests by Fortune 500 companies for special incentives to keep their office jobs in the city. She also took the stage at Internet Week to call the neighborhood nickname "Silicon Alley" outdated, suggesting instead the more global "Technopolis." Thud. (Speechwriters: WTF?)

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At a Crain's forum on landmarking, preservationists wielded a weird argument for keeping midtown east's office inventory frozen in 1949: because the dudes at tech startups dig the character that antiquated spaces offer.

Where to begin? You'd need 100 modest tech startups to replace the 2,000 jobs that financial giants JPMorgan Chase and RBC recently chose to create in New Jersey. That's two-thirds the size of Google's New York City operation, gone with a shrug because they apparently aren't vibrant enough. Math matters, tech boosters. So does mass.

If you're going to wave your tech cred with clichés like "ecosystem," at least bone up on our annual list of the area's largest public companies. You'll find the globe's richest and rarest concentration of big buyers of tech services and R&D in such mainstay industries as finance, media, retail, consumer marketing, health care and more.

They are the reason Silicon Alley is thriving with local startups and the outposts of Silicon Valley giants. If enough corporate customers start believing they won't get a decent return on the investment they make to operate in the country's most expensive marketplace, our tech boom turns to bust.